Vanished

Dutchbar, a community of 1,000 on the east coast of Sri Lanka, was much more like a family than a village. On the morning of December 26, it was wiped off the map by a forty-foot wave. Today the survivors are faced with a choice: return to the place where their families were killed, or leave their village forever

_All of them. They are waiting. They want you to know. I lost my wife and child. My brother was killed. I found my sister at a bend in the road, half-clothed and still warm, barbed wire wound through her hair. I was saved by a monkey in a coconut tree who waved at me and told me to climb. Women bring pictures of their children. He's right there, dressed as the third wise man. That's the whole family in front of the famous waterfall; he's the youngest, a clever child. These photos, fished from the wreckage and dried in the sun, wrapped in paper and carried in pockets, they must all be looked at, each life must be imagined, every frightened child at a school assembly and each young woman going to her first day of work at the bank. _

And still there are more, waiting. Old women and little boys, girls who lost sisters, and a Sunday-school teacher who watched her Bible class carried away. All the fathers whose children were ripped from their arms. One minute he was under my arm like a loaf of bread, and then he was gone. They are countless, among the multitudes, all singing their stories in a tuneless song. Can you hear them? All of them? And will each one be remembered? The one who was to be engaged that day? The one who watched her twin sister carried out to sea? There are thousands of them now, hundreds of thousands, millions, mewling, a lamentation in twenty languages all along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, in countries you can't remember if you know anything about, in cities that sound somehow familiar. Banda Aceh? Krabi? Galle? Wasn't that an ancient empire or a prehistoric skeleton? Don't they make tea there?

Move closer and you can see them. They're coming into focus. There is a ring of them clinging to the edges of a big green island southeast of India. And closer, a city undone by the waters and a tiny village within that city, built onto a sandbar, a thousand people waiting to talk. Why there? Why these and not the others? Why not. Why not these people. You start by listening to just one of them. Closer now.

IT'S TWO WEEKS LATER and fifteen former citizens of Dutchbar sit in a row of old wooden chairs at a municipal office. They've been summoned here to receive their money, $100 for each death. They're made to wait for a long time. They're neither patient nor impatient. They're blank, like their wires have been ripped out. Get a death certificate. Okay, how do I do that? Maybe later they will feel something profound about collecting a sum of money for their dead child, but today they sit and wait and see what happens. Events are no longer expected to make sense.

Sweat, smoke from burning garbage, someone eating a fragrant dal curry in the accounting division. Women in saris labor over monstrous ledger books used in place of computers, entering information in their elegant circular alphabet. Then the government agent arrives with the necessary documents, a Hindu woman in a green sari and a motorcycle helmet. She's been Dutchbar's government agent for years, and she knows everyone in the village, at least on paper.

They follow her into a room with a big wooden desk on a riser. Everyone presses toward it, trying to read the forms backward across the desk. She shoos them like children and back they go into the hallway. Then she calls them in, one at a time. Jerington Speck. He's only 15, but his father, Anton, is still in the hospital, so he's here to collect checks for his mother and sister, now dead. Edna Barthelot is next, and she stares at the ledger suspiciously before signing for her mother. Agnes Delima signs for her husband; Rienz Foulzer for his mother, sister, and grandmother; Terencia Speck, long-necked and beautiful in the way an actress who's playing someone with consumption in a period drama is beautiful, signs for her mother and father. The day of the tsunami was going to be Terencia's engagement party, and that turn of fortune makes her a special case even in Dutchbar, where 150 people out of 1,000 died. Her name is called twice as she sits in her chair, pinching the skin at her elbow, but no one says a word to her.

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Britto Moses is next. Britto is 28 years old, and today he is clean and well groomed as usual, his hair carefully combed, his goatee trimmed so close it almost ceases to exist, a slight scent of baby lotion on him. Britto signs for the money. One hundred dollars for his mother. One hundred dollars for his father. One hundred dollars for his sister. And with this signature, he ends the official existence of his family. He is the only one left, one of the few from Dutchbar who is truly alone.

Dutchbar wasn't a town the way people think of towns. It was more like a tiny principality, settled forty years ago on a finger of sand that points out from the shore of the coastal city of Batticaloa. It was created by Burghers, the Catholic descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch colonists—or at least they once were, centuries ago. The people in Dutchbar still bear their European names, and some of the older ones still speak Portuguese, handed down orally for the past five centuries. They are mostly carpenters, with little money, so Dutchbar came into existence slowly. First there were palm-frond huts, then walls were built and separate kitchens; then wells were dug, electricity was strung out from the city. They lived only with other Burghers, married only other Burghers, bound themselves together and apart from everyone else.

The default unit of measure in Sri Lanka is the family. It's almost irreducible. The government counts families in the census, and it uses families to quantify the eects of the tsunami how many families have been displaced, how many have lost their houses or loved ones. There were 260 families in Dutchbar. But it was mostly a village with five last names: There are probably twenty sets of Ragel families, thirty Specks, twenty Outschoorns, at least twenty-five Barthelots, and probably forty Delimas. And if you consider all the Delimas who married Outschoorns who have Ragel cousins, it's really all just one big family. After the tsunami, the families are reconfiguring themselves, forming scar tissue. Orphans have been gathered up again by aunts and uncles, widows by their sisters and brothers. But Britto was from a family of outsiders. They moved from the hill country and had no relations in the village. There is no one left for him here anymore.

Britto takes his money, folds it neatly into his front pocket, and walks back to St. Cecilia's school, where the village of Dutchbar has been temporarily relocated. Britto is living in a classroom with his friends and their families. He has a small red gym bag in which he keeps his possessions: two pairs of jeans saved from his house and a few donated shirts. He is thinking of taking this money and buying an airplane ticket so he can leave this country.

A few days after the tsunami, Britto went to live with his relatives in Hatton. He's not all that close to them, but that's what's expected in Sri Lanka: When trouble comes, you go with your family. He stayed for one night, and came back.

_I did not want to go with them, he says, because no one was killed. They did not lose their houses and belongings. My relations, I remind them of my mother, and when they see me, they cry. I did not want to bring them that kind of sorrow. _

But he knows he can't stay here either. I am a burden to my relations in Hatton, I am a burden to my friends here. That's why Britto wants to board a jet and fly somewhere, a rich country where he can make money. Where he can create his own future. Because what other future is there? Everyone at St. Cecilia's walks around like zombies, with no idea what will become of their lives. No one is even sure Dutchbar will continue to exist, if there is the land or the resources or the will to build it again.

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You have to be at least two people to be considered a family at the refugee camp and receive a full set of rations. Even if the government builds new houses for the people of Dutchbar, what will they do with Britto? What do you do when you are smaller than the irreducible unit? When your parents are gone, the people who arrange for your marriage, see to your well-being, your life simply a continuation of theirs. When you're stricken with embarrassment at having to ask for anything, a serving of rice or someone to talk to. When it's up to you to bear the burden of mourning on your own.

LOOK CLOSER, at the fishing village of Navaladi, nestled next to Dutchbar. That morning the sky was soft and high, warm and cloudless. Nagarajah, a fisherman, roused his youngest son and saw him off to a small temple, Sri Devi, at the edge of Dutchbar. There were twenty-five sleepy-eyed young students there, with wet hair combed by their mothers, learning to meditate while the sun rose. Then Nagarajah and his other son, Soundrarajan, 10 years old, said their morning prayers.

The first thing everyone heard was shouting. Like there was a brawl in the street. Or, Like there were children playing outside. It was that most rudimentary village-level advance-warning system, and it gave only the most important facts: water and fear. They didn't know what it was then, that some event at the bottom of the sea a thousand miles away had unleashed a pulse of energy toward them. Even now, many people don't know what it was. A volcano in the ocean erupted. The United States tested a nuclear device. Nagarajah thinks it was an act of God incomprehensible to the human mind. That question was abstract, anyway. The message was: The sea is coming. Run. The shouts moved from the houses at the beach, back through the village, and out into Batticaloa town, miles and miles inland, a wave of human shudder and repulse. Someone came to Nagarajah's house and shouted, The waters are coming into the village! Nagarajah looked out of his window and saw.

The few seconds between warning and arrival. Women running in their bedclothes, children standing dumbstruck, some people looking for their families and some people sprinting away. If you slow those seconds down, stretch them, can you see anything? Is there a fault line appearing? The survivors on one side and the doomed on the other? Do they look dierent? Feel something? Are they ghosts even before it happens?

The first wave was like a flood, filling the village instantly. The subterranean water tables were overwhelmed; wells burst like fountains fifteen feet in the air, and the earth exploded in places as if by land mines. Nagarajah gathered his older son and ran toward Sri Devi to collect his younger son, but he had to turn back, away from the sea. Only three of twenty-five from Sri Devi would live. The second wave you could hear. It was like Ooooooooh. Or, The sound of a hundred airplane engines. Some looked back once and saw its approach. High thirty feet, forty feet. And as the sun was low, the wave cast its shadow over the villages. To Nagarajah it appeared like a cobra, the Hindu deity, risen to strike: God gathering up the people and taking them back into his fold. Before it hit, Nagarajah grabbed a tree and told Soundrarajan, his 10-year-old, the quiet one, to climb onto his back. He told him, wrap your arms and legs around me tight. Some said the water was tar black and unnatural. Some thought it felt acidic, stinging. To Nagarajah, who was a fisherman and spent most of his days on the sea, it felt too cold, as if it were water from the great depths that was never meant to be touched.

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_The second wave swept over his head and he let go, riding the debris with Soundrarajan on his back. He felt himself pass over the top of a palm tree, scraping a deep groove into his chest. The next period was dark. He remembers going down. Once. Twice. He was aspirating water, breathing it into his lungs as if it were air. And there was a weight on him, dragging him under, choking his breath. He came up and saw shards of light, and then he was under again, this thing pulling him down, and the need to get to the surface was profound, that message from his brain louder and more powerful than anything else. So he broke free of the weight. And almost instantly, he had the sense memory of wrenching his son's grip from around his neck. He could feel the energy of his small arms fighting to stay on. Nagarajah could breathe now, and he watched his son surface for a second or two, then once more, only for an instant. _

_Nagarajah saw his wife afterward. He said, I lost Soundrarajan. She said, Where's Soundrarajan. She said, Where is he, you bastard, he was with you. Nagarajah said, _I had to get him off me. He was killing me. He was going to kill us.

THE MEN WASH first at St. Cecilia's, out at the well in the courtyard, soaping themselves and pulling buckets of water up with a rope. Then the women come, in groups of four or five, giggling. They bathe in their sarongs, reaching underneath to wash themselves and rinse, using them like personal shower curtains. Children stand around brushing their teeth, sometimes forgetting what they're doing and starting a game of hopscotch with a mouthful of lather.

After breakfast is handed out lumps of rice wrapped in plastic and sheets of newspaper the women sweep the hallways and wash clothes in bright plastic tubs. The men get ready to leave. Most are gone by 8 or 9. They don't have jobs to go to anymore, so they go back to Dutchbar to try to rescue anything of value or to walk the streets of Batticaloa. Justin Starrack goes to his carpentry shop. He has no tools they've been washed away but he goes there anyway because that's what men do. They leave during the day with other men and come back in the afternoon. There is nothing to look forward to, no future to imagine, so it's reassuring to go through the motions, the phantom twitching of an amputated life.

All day the children play cricket and basketball and dam, a checkers game they found in an empty schoolroom. They play a game by the well where they splash each other and yell "Tsunami!" Sometimes they can't believe their great fortune. No school, most of their friends are around, left to roam free in this place all day. But there's no real joy in it; there's something blocking it that isn't talked about, of course, only observed. Kids can't speak about things like that. But they talk about their fear, sometimes. The wave had come to take them, and it will be back. Even the adults are afraid that somehow whatever it was that lived inside that wave is going to find them. They share the same dream: They're back in Dutchbar, the water is right behind them, and they're running.

They know that even if everything appears normal, you can't count on it. The sky was soft and high, warm and cloudless. It's like that theory of quantum physics, that what we see and feel is not as reliable as we think it is. At the subatomic level, matter is constantly flickering in and out of existence, and what we think of as a specific reality is just the appearance of a specific reality. Normally, it's best to ignore this information because it's terrifying, and on a large scale it doesn't much matter; the world is predictable. But on a small scale, the world is liable to do capricious things. To disappear on us. It's the terror we know, which rises up occasionally, when the phone rings in the middle of the night or the plane passes through turbulence. There one minute, gone the next.

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In the afternoon, Britto goes out to the courtyard to join the crowd around a man named Ivoe Balthazaar, an upright 57-year-old with a small mustache. Ivoe has a special place in the village: He speaks English. A beautiful, arcane version of the King's English with rolling _r'_s, a sound and vocabulary that doesn't exist anymore. It falls to Ivoe to write letters, fill out forms, name the town's children. There's a line of people near him with death certificates and insurance claims to be completed, applications for bankbooks and ID forms, since all that was washed away in the waves. He does not ask for payment for his services, and none is offered.

Britto has a copy of a document he thinks will get him into Canada. He bought it at the photocopy store for five cents, and he gives it to Ivoe to fill out. Under the situation for which Britto is seeking entry, Ivoe writes, "My house and belongings were washed away. I lost my parents and elder sister during the disaster. I am now alone and have no one. So I want to leave the country."

Ivoe is filling out more and more visa applications. People want to leave. They're fed up with Sri Lanka. Even the people who want to stay are wondering what they have to look forward to. The 850 surviving residents of Dutchbar will have to leave this camp; some say it will be in a week or two; some say longer. Some say the government will build one giant village for the aected towns, and they will all be mid together. Some say they will build a giant apartment building where Dutchbar used to be, like a vertical village. The Dutchbar Arms, maybe, or the Dutchbar Towers. A government agent tells them the city is looking for land so they can build a new Dutchbar. But none of that will happen for a while. In the meantime, there is nothing to do but wait. But what exactly they are waiting for no one knows.

It is like we are out in the sea at night, Ivoe says. Not even knowing which way the land is, but we must swim, swim, swim. We don't feel a direction now. We are just waiting. We are not a town anymore. We are a people who are remaining.

Britto doesn't think he can wait to find out what will happen to Dutchbar, because there's no longer a place for him here. That is why he has bought his Canadian documents. Once his form is filled out, he goes to take a nap. Then, after dinner, he and his friend Richard Speck take an eight-hour bus ride to Colombo, the capital, arriving at four-thirty in the morning. Britto goes straight to the Canadian embassy and waits for it to open. There's a rumor that the Canadians are going to let tsunami victims emigrate, and there's a large crowd gathered at the gates, clutching their documents, folding and refolding them, squatting and eating bananas in the hours before the day grows hot.

The guard at the gate doesn't even let Britto into the courtyard. Do you have a sponsor in Canada? the man asks him. Then there's no use to your coming in, your application won't be looked at. And for a moment Britto is brought low again, as low as he's been in days. Canada is something he's been holding close, keeping in reserve to ward off the crushing facts. And now this security guard won't even let him past the gate, just turns to deal with the half-crazed old man who's next, and Britto turns invisible. He sits down and lets himself think about his sister. Her ID card is in his wallet, and he takes it out. She's beautiful and fair in the picture, a black and white shot that makes her look like she's from another era. She was 30 years old, too old to be unmarried in Dutchbar. She'd confessed to her friends that she was afraid her parents had given up on marrying her but couldn't bring themselves to tell her. The most important thing in arranging a marriage is the dowry, and there was no dowry to speak of in Britto's family. Britto never talked about it with her, though. It might have embarrassed her.

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LOOK AGAIN NOW, where the waves just swept through. Darkness. All around were broken things and swirling water. There was a woman there, floating. Jasintha Singarajah, age 50. When she came to, she thought she was still in her house with her family. Then she opened her eyes and saw the black bridge over her, the one on the main road a couple of miles from Dutchbar. There were people on the bridge, leaning over the rail and shouting things she could not hear as she passed beneath. When they opened their mouths, the sounds of a waterfall came out. She realized she was holding a piece of timber to her body, perhaps one of the beams from her house. She saw lava floes of splintered wood, a holy-water bottle made of yellow plastic in the form of the Virgin Mary. She saw Anton Speck, a man she knew from Dutchbar, his face just above the surface, his almost toothless mouth gasping and his eyes closed. Anton Speck, a man who cannot swim and had not thought to grab on to a piece of wood, borne up by the water and carried.

Jasintha had been at home with her family. The first wave came in through the window, and everyone flew through the rooms of the house trying to get out. The second wave came maybe thirty seconds later and filled the house instantly. Her husband, mother, two children, and a neighbor boy who'd come over to eat a piece of Christmas cake all drowned, pressed against the ceiling. God, please forgive our sins and take us all together, she said. Jasintha was somehow lifted up through the disintegrating house, out through the roof, and shot past Dutchbar into the lagoon behind.

_When the water slowed, Anton and Jasintha were in Kattankudy, five miles from Dutchbar. There were bodies floating around her, and a fleet of one-man fishing boats looking for survivors. When they found her, she was too weak to open her arms. A boatman pulled her in and paddled her back to shore, where they saw Anton, lying facedown, bleeding from the head. This one's dead, someone said, but as they made to carry him they saw he was breathing. Hey, one of them said, that's Anton Speck. Anton had been washed all the way to the neighborhood where he worked. _He's a very good carpenter, he worked on my house.

But wait. Don't go yet. There's more. Look, Jasintha says, here's a picture of my daughter. That's my son. He dressed up as Santa Claus just the night before. He wore a red robe and brought samosas to his aunt in a red bag. Jasintha has more to show you. It's urgent that you see. But why? What does she want? Maybe recognition, an accounting. But that will be impossible here. The numbers are too great. A husband and two children lost to a woman of 50, everything she'd worked to make in this world gone—that's just average. That doesn't even get you on the news. There are a thousand Dutchbars, a thousand more horrible places. There are a million Jasinthas in Sri Lanka and India and Indonesia. You say to her: I can't imagine. And you can't. You can't possibly imagine every single one of them. There is not enough compassion. You have to turn down the volume or risk going mad.

BRITTO LEAVES THE camp and goes back to Dutchbar every few days. He doesn't like being there, but he can't stay away. The village looks like it had been destroyed and abandoned years ago. It has been taken over by the black crows who eat the dead things and the dogs who trot around as if on their way to work. All the houses are alone now, free of their owners, fully unbuilt by the sea and spread flat in the strong sunlight and humidity.

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Dutchbar shows itself from the inside out. The contents of closets, cracked toilets from outhouses, report cards, all luridly strewn amid shattered brick. It's not preserved in its last moments of panic, the way the subbasements of the World Trade Center complex were, or the classrooms and homes of Chernobyl, writing still on the blackboards and jackets still over chairs. It's erased. Houses, workshops, record collections, anything with human narrative, gone. On December 26, 2004, Dutchbar vanished. There will be no record of it. Even people who've lived their entire lives here have trouble finding their own homes now.

Britto stands at the rubble that was his house, the way people stand at grave sites. Richard Speck is at his house down the way, pulling out the iron and tin, anything that can be sold for scrap. Ivan Delima is looking for his refrigerator. Victorine Balthazaar, 15, is picking her way through the wrecked rooms of her house, wearing a long tangerine frock, looking once again for that new denim suit she never got to wear. One of the Ragels sweeps the sand off the floor of a house that no longer exists. But mostly what people do here is what Britto does: stand over their former homes with their hands on their hips, circling the wreckage of their lives. No one can bring themselves to rebuild, but neither can they keep from coming back to sit here during the day. They hover, preoccupied, over their pasts. A very few people glance at the water, but no one goes near it. The wide, beautiful beach is always empty, the sea lapping happily at the sand like a dog panting and grinning, completely unaware that he's just murdered his own litter.

A motorcade of four cars with VIP signs in their front windows pull up to Dutchbar's Catholic church. The cardinal of the Washington, D.C., archdiocese emerges, followed by a still photographer and a cameraman with a light who runs ahead and films the cardinal walking into the church. Britto comes to see what's going on. There's a small crowd gathered, and the cardinal recites a prayer in Latin and then says, _There's no way to make sense of this thing. Maybe someday, when we meet Him, we will understand. In the meantime, we mourn with you. _

After the foreigner gets back into his white sedan and the motorcade moves off, Father Joe Mary speaks. He is Dutchbar's priest. Everyone will move back here, he says. We will use money from this foreigner and other foreigners to build a temporary camp here, where you can live while you rebuild. You shouldn't be afraid; the tsunami won't come again. There are plane crashes, but people still fly.

But almost no one is willing to come back here. The sea on one side and the lagoon on the other and nowhere to run.

The priest is selfish-minded, Annette Ragel says. He cares only about keeping his parish. Give him a glass of water from my well, where a dead dog is decaying, and see if he wants to stay.

The crowd disperses, and people visit the places they need to visit. Some go to the mass graves down near the lagoon, where the bodies were buried only half-burned. Britto traces the path he took the day of the tsunami and comes eventually to the spot on Kamilus Road, beneath an electric pole, where he found his sister's body. He squats for a while there and picks at a fingernail.

Britto had been one of the people on the bridge on December 26. There was a certain sick-making thrill to it, the sheer volume of destruction, the people screaming past below. In the distance, only the tops of the palm trees were visible, where Dutchbar and Navaladi used to stand.

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Britto had come to Batticaloa with his friend Shawn Ragel that morning. Up early, on the motorbike, to drop off Shawn's application to the technical school at the teacher's house and stop for tea before returning to Dutchbar. We were gone for just ten minutes! Shawn and Britto said to each other on the bridge. Ten minutes!

There was still three feet of water on the road when he started walking back that day. The people of Dutchbar moved past him, some running, bleeding from the head, half-clothed, screaming, looking for loved ones. I called to your family when I ran, Earlane Ragel told him, but I don't know if they heard. Britto felt, with his clean hair and dry clothes, like an outsider. People tell him now, You're lucky. But it would have been better somehow to have been dragged by the waves than to have been completely untouched. If I had been there, either I could have saved my family or I would have gone with them, and either would be better than this.

When he reached Dutchbar, men were wandering in groups of two or three, searching, calling out the names of the missing. The dead were everywhere. Tenny Starrack was trying to give a 2-year-old girl CPR on the roof of a house, but she was already dead. They wouldn't find Britto's mother's body for three days, and when the volunteers discovered her they would see that her face had been bashed in by something when she was carried off—they only showed Britto her legs before they took her to the mass graves.

Britto would spend days in the hospital looking for his father—the bodies overflowing the morgue, lining the hallways and the veranda and arranged around the big tree in the courtyard. He would see Deckman Delima's body, and Shanthi and the boy with the deformed leg. He thinks his father's body was buried in one of the mass graves before he could identify it.

Britto found his sister himself that day, on his way home from Batticaloa, 400 yards from his house. It had been only thirty minutes since the waves, and her body was still warm. Her dress was ripped to the waist, and she was covered in whorls of silt. Twigs and a strand of barbed wire wound in her hair and white foam came from her mouth. He picked up her body and carried it to St. Ignatius church. He set her down on a pew and waited for Father Joe Mary. He thought, Now she'll never be married. Britto always felt a sense of responsibility for his sister, and he sat in the church trying to work out how this thing could end with her feeling that she'd had the life she'd imagined for herself since she was small. He found a dress that had been washed from someone's house and draped it over her body.

When he is done remembering, Britto leaves the spot under the electric pole. He finds Shawn Ragel and gets on the back of his scooter. It's almost five-thirty, and there is an exodus from Dutchbar, a procession of bicycles and three-wheeled taxis all headed in the same direction: away. No one wants to be here at night. Even the few families who think of moving back to Dutchbar can't bring themselves to sleep here. The people across the lagoon say they hear screaming at night. Help me! Mommy! Daddy! Save me! A few days ago, one of the Delima boys saw his father and Sherley Balthazaar's mother by the side of the road just after dusk, in the clothes they were wearing when they were killed, still wet.

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One of the last to leave Dutchbar today is a small boy in a T-shirt that says REAL CHICKS. As he's running to catch up with his father, he comes across a femur bone in the sand and shrieks, then freezes. But it's not from one of the tsunami victims. It's an old bone, yellowed and dried, belonging to Ivoe Balthazaar's father-in-law. His grave, in a small plot next to the village, was smashed and unearthed by the waves. There had been a cemetery in Dutchbar before it was a village, forty years ago. And as the Ragels and Delimas and Outschoorns moved in, some simply pulled up the headstones and built their houses over the interred. Dutchbar was built on a cemetery and has ended up a cemetery. Or you can see it another way: It was once a village and will almost certainly one day be a village again when someone new discovers it. We can't be sentimental for too long. Every place is haunted. Every city is a graveyard.

LISTEN NOW. _Hear how quiet it was? Terencia Speck was holding on to the top of a tree a few hundred feet from her home, and the water was receding. Her engagement party was going to be at noon that day, and her family had been preparing. The furniture had to be moved, and moved back. The liquor bottles needed to be set out, because when you are a Burgher the liquor bottles are the most essential part! The aunts were sweeping. Even the uncles were sweeping. Her mother: Everything must be right. There should be no mistakes! The fiancé's family must not want for anything. You could hear the din of nervous energy, like an orchestra tuning just as the audience is seated. But now there was no sound except the draining of water. _

_The waves came to Justin Starrack's and stole his carpentry tools. They emptied Victorine Balthazaar's closet and took the new denim suit she wanted to wear on New Year's. They came to Terencia Speck's and smashed the cake for her engagement party, frosted and sitting in the kitchen under cloth; they took the cubed beef and chopped vegetables to be cooked later that day; they took the younger cousins who had slept scattered on the floor in Terencia's room; they took her new dress, hung near the door so she could see it while she lay in bed, to who knows what watery depths.

Twenty-one people slept at Terencia's the night before, and eight of them are dead. Her aunts and nieces and cousins. Her father left the roof of a house to go look for her mother after the first wave, and Terencia wouldn't see either of them alive again. Did that make it her fault, if everyone came here for her party?_

Afterward it was Terencia, alone in the tree, looking down. All around the village the surviving members of the population were in the high places, clinging. Francis Ragel in a tree. Mrs. Starrack and her son hanging from a roof like they're little kids playing. A hundred people on the top of the highest, strongest house in the village. Like the laws of physics were suspended briefly and then turned back on, and everyone had to grab something or plummet. Terencia felt her arms grow weak, the rough bark digging into the pads of her hands. She was determined to stay up there until everything reversed itself, until the water came back and rebuilt everything, returned her dress and her cake and the little cousins asleep on the floor, and she could be engaged in a few hours.

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AT ONE TWENTY-TWO in the afternoon, three young men from the government arrive at St. Cecilia's to announce that a decision has been made about the future of the village. A circle of people, maybe a hundred, forms around the officials as they make their pitch for relocating Dutchbar to a plot of land out near the railroad tracks. It's mostly men, standing on tiptoe, with their hands on one another's shoulders, listening quietly. The officials say, Go look at the land, think about it overnight, and give your answer in the morning.

At four thirty they set out. There are twenty or thirty scooters and motorbikes, each with two or three people, one male from every clan in Dutchbar, or at least whoever was around. They get lost a couple of times, and they have to get directions. At a clearing, everyone leaves their motorcycles and walks down the center of a set of railroad tracks toward a flat, sandy parcel of scrubland. Anton Speck shouts, and they look back to see a train coming.

We escaped the tsunami, Godfrey Johnson says. But our children will be killed off by trains!

The soil is sandy and the trees are low. Not a man-made structure visible in any direction. Someone says, The place is so far from town, the government should buy everyone a motorcycle. Someone else says, We will have to be good at sleeping, because we're too far to work! Godfrey bends down and starts digging a hole. He tastes the soil to see if the water below will be salty. Someone picks up a branch and says, We must plant the flag of the Burghers! We have landed! Another man says, It should be a liquor bottle, not a tree! There is a change in the men, a new lightness. Britto takes a brick and proclaims that he is planting the cornerstone of the new Dutchbar. Someone says, We can't call it Dutchbar, we'll have to call it Tsunami Dutchbar. Or just Tsunami. To which Godfrey replies, We don't want to have the same name as every other village! Someone walks a few hundred yards to a small farm and questions the farmer about the area; the water is good, the main road is only two kilometers away.

I like it, Ivoe says after a while. I like it very much. There is space to roam about and to have our own village, our own place. I am happy.

Britto says that when a connecting road is built, it will be a good place. But he will not live here. This is where their paths fork; Dutchbar turning toward this new land, a spot in the distance to concentrate on, and Britto splitting off. I am alone. He will move to Hatton, he thinks, where his relatives live. Or maybe Australia. He bought a visa application that morning. If I go to Hatton, those people won't know about this. They won't talk about it. So I can little by little forget and start a new life again.

He says these things with a sense of closure, but in other moments there is still doubt. The night before, he sat and talked to Earlane Ragel in the breezeway while everyone slept. He lives with Earlane at St. Cecilia's, and before that she'd been Britto's closest neighbor, a second mother to him, a confidante to his sister. You are reluctant to go to Hatton because you are so close to us and because you were with us when this happened, she said. Britto sat with his hands between his legs; the sounds of people waking from the dream and settling back into slumber echoed in the concrete hallways. Go to Hatton, she said, because she knew that he still hoped somehow he'd live in Dutchbar, taken up by a family the way the orphans were. If our new house is big, I will take you back and you can live with us, no problem. But I think my house will be very small. Even if we wanted, we could not have you there.

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It's getting dark now, and the men begin to walk back, down the tracks. They start their scooters again and drive home to St. Cecilia's.

_How long can you stay here? How many can you talk to? How long can you listen before it's time to turn away again? _

Richard and Anton, Ivoe and Godfrey, walking down the railway tracks from their new town, turning their thoughts away from the past for the first time since it happened, they're all growing smaller. The government has a meeting where people present plans for the new Dutchbar. Britto will move to Hatton, where he will try not to tell the story about how he found his sister's body in the road, only partly clothed, still warm. He will fall again into the broad stream of predictable human life where the rest of us live, carried on to a more predictable future. Meanwhile, the camps are shrinking. People strike out for new lands. Mothers move in with their grown children across town. Brothers take in widowed sisters and their surviving children. Terencia Speck and her fiancé are married in a quiet ceremony that follows almsgiving for her dead family. The catastrophically wounded are being reabsorbed. The event recedes. Sri Lanka, briefly lifted off the map and made large and glowing, settles back down. An obscure island off the coast of India. Don't they make tea there? The people calling out their stories begin to drop away, turning back to their lives. But tonight they will sleep again at St. Cecilia's, and they will have the same dream. There are still some who want to tell their stories. They want you to listen. They can't go yet. How long is long enough to stay here, before you leave?

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